Pallet Craft #9: Why I Pallet Craft!

For all the images on this entry and others please go to my blog: pallet craft!

Hello All,

This is part of my series Pallet Craft on my blog. It is pooring out once again, and because I have nowhere else to work on my projects except for my mobile work station (outdoors), I decided to blog about why I do what I do.

Woodworking in general came to me as something foriegn that I had never really given a lot of thought of doing (I mean common, I was a tech student), I thought of it as something only the “pros” really get into. Then it happened, I met the woman that would be my wife and I wanted to build things for her as gifts. Next thing I knew I fell into the woodworking hobby and I absolutely love it! A year and a half later I am now working on my own series called Pallet Craft.

Working with Pallets have many pros and cons as with anything else in the world these days. Some of the pros include its cheap (or even free), its gratifying and very simplistic; cons include its cheap, some wood is of a lot less quality, it takes a lot of extra time and propper planning, breaking down pallets can be very tedious and some pallets are chemical treated to kill off pests. Now the latter was a major concern for me when I started working with the pallets, but I did some of my own investigation and I discovered I can avoid issues by: Using heat treated pallets, taking pallets that don’t have a lot of age to them and not collecting them from chemical plants or foodmarts. The combination of the last two points is important in trying to calculate the lifespan and use of the pallets. But all of these reasons are not the reason I pallet craft.

I use pallets because nearly 500 million NEW pallets are built every year in the U.S. alone, while many many, many pallets end up in stockpiles for waste and decay or for burning or in landfills. To put a number on this, in 1995 alone, 68,000 tons of pallet wood was thrown out and wasted in Minnesota. This is not only wasteful, but its ecologically unstable and harmful to the earth. Therefore my motto on my blog is “Recycling what we waste to make what we want!”

So why do I do it? To make a difference, to build, to recycle, to Pallet Craft!